Eurasian Lynx

The Eurasian lynx, Lynx lynx, is a medium sized wild cat and the largest member of the lynx genus. In Europe it is usually just called the lynx or the European lynx, while scientists prefer Eurasian lynx because the species also covers a huge part of Asia. Carl Linnaeus described it in 1758. There are four lynx species in the world. The Eurasian lynx is the biggest and most widespread, the Canada lynx lives in the forests of North America, the bobcat ranges from southern Canada to Mexico, and the Iberian lynx survives only in Spain and Portugal. All share a short tail, long legs, a ruff of fur around the face and black ear tufts. Experts recognize several subspecies, although the exact list is still debated. They include the Northern lynx of Scandinavia and European Russia, the Carpathian lynx, the very rare Balkan lynx, the Caucasian lynx, the Turkestan lynx of Central Asia and the Siberian lynx, east of the Yenisei River.

The Siberian lynx is not a separate species but the Eurasian lynx of Siberia and the Russian Far East, usually classified as the subspecies Lynx lynx wrangeli, with a range that reaches northeastern China. Lynx from the north and east of the range tend to be bigger than those from the south and west, so Siberian lynx are among the largest of all. Males can reach about 38 kilograms, while many lynx in Western Europe weigh less than 25. Their winter coat is very long and dense, often pale gray with faint spots, which helps them hide in snowy taiga and survive temperatures far below freezing. Their wide paws spread their weight on deep snow, where they hunt hares, musk deer, roe deer and young reindeer. In the wild it is a shy forest animal that is almost never seen, and most of what is known about it comes from tracks in the snow, which hunters and biologists in Russia use every winter to estimate numbers. Russia holds most of the world's Eurasian lynx.

The Eurasian lynx is the largest lynx in the world and about the size of a big dog. Adults usually measure 80 to 130 centimeters from nose to rump, plus a short tail of 11 to 25 centimeters, and stand roughly 60 to 75 centimeters at the shoulder. Males are about a quarter heavier than females. In most of Europe males weigh around 18 to 30 kilograms, while lynx in the Caucasus and parts of the Balkans are often smaller. The legs are long, the hind legs a little longer than the front, and the paws are very large, covered with thick fur in winter so they work like snowshoes. The coat changes with season and region: short and reddish brown in summer, long, thick and grayer in winter. Some lynx have clear dark spots, others streaks or almost no pattern at all. The face has a ruff of long fur like sideburns, the ears end in black tufts about 4 centimeters long, and the short tail always has a black tip.

The Eurasian lynx has one of the largest ranges of any wild cat. It lives from Scandinavia and Central Europe across Russia to the Pacific coast, and south through the Caucasus, Türkiye and Iran to Central Asia, the Himalayas, the Tibetan Plateau, Mongolia and northern China, from sea level to more than 5,000 meters. In Europe and Siberia it is mainly a forest animal, living in taiga, mixed woods and mountain forests with plenty of cover and roe deer. Rugged ground with rocks, cliffs and thick undergrowth suits it best, giving it places to stalk prey and raise cubs. Farther south it uses rocky slopes, juniper woods and shrubland, and in Ladakh, Nepal and Tibet it lives in open, cold mountain country above the tree line, alongside snow leopards. In Western and Central Europe populations are often small and separated by farmland, roads and towns, so large connected forests and wildlife corridors are key for the species.

The Eurasian lynx is a meat eater and the only cat in Europe that regularly hunts deer. Across most of Europe its main prey is the roe deer, which can make up most of what it eats in a year. In the Alps and the Jura it also takes many chamois, and it can kill animals several times its own weight, such as red deer hinds and calves. In northern Scandinavia, where roe deer are scarce, semi domestic reindeer become a key prey. In Siberia hares are very important, together with musk deer, roe deer and grouse, and in Central Asia the lynx hunts hares, marmots, wild sheep and goats. It also eats foxes, rodents and birds when it can. Studies in Switzerland found that a lynx kills about one roe deer or chamois a week. After a large kill it drags the carcass to cover, hides it under leaves or snow and returns for several nights, eating a few kilograms at a time. These hidden kills are one of the clearest signs that a lynx lives in an area.

The Eurasian lynx is a solitary hunter. Adults live alone and meet only to mate, although a mother and her cubs travel together for most of a year. Each lynx has a home range that it marks with urine, droppings and scratches on trees. Ranges are huge for a cat of its size. In Switzerland males often use 150 to 250 square kilometers, while in Scandinavia and Siberia, where prey is scarcer, a single lynx may roam more than 1,000. A male's range usually overlaps those of one or more females. The lynx is most active at dusk, at night and at dawn, and rests by day in dense cover or among rocks. It does not chase prey far. Instead it moves slowly and silently through the undergrowth, finds prey with its excellent hearing and eyesight, and attacks with a short rush of a few bounds or waits in ambush beside a trail, usually killing deer with a bite to the throat. A lynx can walk 20 kilometers or more in a night, and it climbs and swims well.

Eurasian lynx mate in late winter, mostly between February and April, when males and females call to each other with loud, harsh cries that carry far through the forest. After a pregnancy of about 70 days, the female gives birth in May or June in a hidden den among rocks, under fallen trees, in a thicket or inside a hollow. A litter usually has 2 or 3 cubs, though it can range from 1 to 4. The newborns weigh about 240 to 430 grams and are blind and helpless. They open their eyes after around two weeks and begin to eat meat at about a month old, when the mother starts bringing them prey and moving them between dens. Cubs stay with her through the first winter, about ten months in all, following her as she hunts and learning to stalk. Many do not survive their first year. In spring the young set off to find a range of their own, sometimes walking hundreds of kilometers. Females can breed at about two years old, males usually a year later.

The Eurasian lynx is not considered dangerous to people. Although it is the third largest predator in Europe after the brown bear and the wolf, healthy wild lynx avoid humans, and attacks on people are practically unknown. Most people who live in lynx country never see one, because the cat hears or smells them long before and slips away into cover. The rare cases of lynx acting strangely around people have usually involved animals that were sick, injured or raised in captivity. The real conflict is about livestock and game. In Norway lynx kill many sheep that graze unguarded in forests and mountains in summer, and in northern Norway and Sweden they take reindeer, so both countries pay compensation and manage the population with hunting quotas. Some hunters also see the lynx as a rival for roe deer. This conflict is the main reason for illegal killing, which remains one of the biggest threats to small lynx populations in Central Europe.

By the middle of the twentieth century, hunting, deforestation and the loss of deer had wiped out the lynx from most of Western and Central Europe. Its return began in 1971, when lynx from the Slovak Carpathians were released in Switzerland, where they now live in the Jura and the Alps. Slovenia brought back six lynx in 1973, founding the Dinaric population of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Czechia released lynx in the Šumava forest in the 1980s, creating the population shared with Bavaria and Austria, and France did the same in the Vosges between 1983 and 1993. Germany has reintroduced lynx in the Harz since 2000, in the Palatinate Forest, the Black Forest and the Thuringian Forest. Since 2019 the LIFE Lynx project has moved lynx from Romania and Slovakia to Slovenia and Croatia to fight inbreeding. In Britain the lynx has been gone for over a thousand years, and four lynx released illegally in the Scottish Highlands in January 2025 were quickly captured.

The Eurasian lynx is not endangered as a species. The IUCN lists it as Least Concern, thanks to its huge range, and Russia holds by far the largest number of lynx, although there is no reliable global count. In Europe, the Large Carnivore Initiative for Europe estimated about 9,400 lynx in 2024, most of them in the Scandinavian, Karelian, Baltic and Carpathian populations, which are stable or growing slowly. The picture is very different for some smaller groups. The Balkan lynx of Albania, North Macedonia and Kosovo numbers only a few dozen adults and is assessed by the IUCN as a Critically Endangered subpopulation, while the reintroduced lynx of the Alps, the Vosges, the Harz and the Dinaric mountains remain few and partly isolated. The main threats are illegal killing, traffic accidents, inbreeding, the loss of large forests and fewer deer in some areas. The lynx is protected in the European Union under the Habitats Directive and the Bern Convention.